How to Grow Your SaaS Recurring Revenue Without Marketing

JD Graffam is the founder of SimpleFocus, a design agency that helps create user interfaces and digital products.

The company's clients include Starbucks, Oracle, and the U.S. Air Force.

But this agency is a little different because it also has its own portfolio of software products.

This includes Pulse (a cash flow management software for small businesses), Sifter (a bug and issue tracking app for nimble teams) and BallPark (an invoicing and time tracking app) that JD acquired from Metalab's founder Andrew Wilkinson (who was my guest on episode 76).

And JD just acquired another app called Curated (a product that helps you grow your audience by collecting and sharing engaging content).

This episode is about a design agency owner who wanted to get into the SaaS business.

He didn't have any success building his own SaaS product, so he acquired one instead.

The SaaS product that he acquired, already had customers and some recurring revenue.

He and his team improved the product and over time, more than doubled the monthly recurring revenue.

So he acquired another SaaS product and did the same again. And in the last few years, my guest has built a portfolio of 6 SaaS products, all through acquisitions, and he's still looking for more.

The remarkable thing is that he's grown recurring revenue for his products without any marketing.

He just focused on serving the existing customers better and improving the products.

In this episode, we talk about how he acquired his first SaaS product, what he did to grow recurring revenue, what he looks for when acquiring a SaaS product and how he manages multiple products and businesses.